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Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest – 2014

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest: Every year since 1989, April 28th has been International Workers’ Memorial Day, and on Monday 28th April 2014 I once more attended the event commemorating this at the statue of the Building Worker on Tower Hill in London, later going to Parliament Square where protesters called on MPs to vote against the HS2 Bill being debated in the House of Commons.

Workers Memorial Day

Tower Hill

One of the more hazardous industries in the UK is construction, and the annual Workers Memorial Day points this out. There had been over 50 deaths on construction sites in the previous year and the rally place around a coffin with boots, work gloves and hard hats.

Workers Memorial Day, HS2 Protest - 2014

A TUC report published for the day, ‘Toxic, Corrosive and Hazardous: The government’s record on health and safety‘ pointed out that since the coalition government came to power in 2010 it had “drastically cut Health and Safety Executive (HSE) inspections, cut funding to the HSE by 40 per cent, blocked new regulations and removed vital existing protections, prevented improved European regulation on health and safety, cut support for employers and health and safety reps, seen local authorities reduce their workplace inspections by 93 per cent, and made it much harder for workers to claim compensation if they are injured or made ill at work following employer negligence.”

The government was now planning to exempt many ‘self-employed workers’ from health and safety protection – despite them being twice as likely to be killed at work than other workers.

This attack on health and safety, carried out under the title of ‘reducing red tape’ also played an important role in providing the environment which allowed the disastrous fire at Grenfell Tower.

The theme for the 2014 events from the ITUC, the global union body coordinating the event worldwide, is ‘Protecting workers around the world through strong regulation, enforcement and union rights’ and it encouraged unions to use the slogan, ‘Unions make work safer’.

There were speeches including by Gail Cartmail, Assistant General Secretary of Unite, Tony O’Brien of the Construction Safety Campaign and Jerry Swain Regional Secretary for UCATT’s London and South East Region, after which wreaths and flowers were laid at the base of the statue by UCATT, Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman and Liliana Alexa who founded the Battersea Crane Disaster Action Group after her son Michael was killed by a falling crane as he walked past a building site near his Battersea home.

The event ended with the release of black balloons, for the 50 workers killed in the last year and a period of silence around the coffin with its boots, hard hat and work gloves and a hard hat for each one of them.

More pictures from Workers Memorial Day

Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament

Old Palace Yard, Westminster

HS2 is generally seen now as an expensive disaster, failing to achieve its aims and becoming something of a white elephant. It doesn’t go to where it was intended and will have to run rather slower than planned.

Despite the plans to run to Manchester and Leeds having been dropped the scheme has had a massive increase in costs. It still remains doubtful if it will ever actually reach its intended destination in London, Euston or simply serve its temporary terminus at Old Oak Common, six miles out in the middle of nowhere very much, where it will largely rely on a connection to the Elizabeth Line.

The project was almost certainly doomed from the start in 2009 under Labour, but its position was worsened by decisions by each successive government. There are various detailed studies of where it went wrong on-line, including by Graham Winch of the Productivity Institute.

The London to Birmingham section we may one day get was only a minor aspect of the original scheme and a part that offers relatively little gain – nobody really needs to get to Birmingham 20 minutes faster. Its route was poorly chosen and bound to result in the kind of local opposition that has greatly put up costs, and the whole project was severely over-specified – and in a way that makes it incompatible with the existing network.

Others, such as High Speed UK have developed much more coherent plans for the future UK rail network which governments have refused to consider seriously – and were one of those supporting and speaking at this protest. Their plans in 2014 would have avoided “damage to the Chilterns by following the M1 and would be 25% cheaper than HS2, while offering time savings on average of 40% for most intercity services – not just those on the high speed route.“

This was a relatively small demonstration with perhaps a couple of hundred people, but a colourful one, with a large inflatable white elephant and a couple of bears with a very large rail ticket about the £50 billion rip-off of HS2. There were speeches including from several MPs and campaigners.

More at Stop HS2 Rally at Parliament.

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Housing For Need Not Greed

Housing For Need Not Greed: Mostly my posts here look at old work, either from a few years ago or my work on London back in the 1980s and 90s. But I’m still goining out at taking pctures if not quite as often as I once did. So this post is about one of the two events I photographed last weekend.

Last Saturday, 8th July 2023 was National Housing Action Day, and a march from the Elephant to the Aylesbury Estate was one of 16 across the country on National Housing Day. Others were taking place in Lambeth, Islington, Kensington, Cardiff, Glasgow, Abbey Wood, Wandsworth, Harlow, Merton, Ealing, Cornwall, Folkestone, Devon, Birmingham, and Hastings.

Housing For Need Not Greed -Tanya Murat - Southwark Defend Council Housing — *Tanya Murat – Southwark Defend Council Housing*

The Southwark protest demanded Southwark Council stop demolishing council homes and refurbish and repopulate estates to house people and end the huge carbon footprint of demolish and rebuild. They demanded housing for need not corporate greed, refurbishment not demolition, filling of empty homes and an end to the leasehold system.

Housing For Need Not Greed — *Marchers at the Elephant on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*

Demolition and rebuilding of housing produces huge amounts of CO2, and whenever possible should be avoided now we are aware of the real dangers of global warming. Instead existing buildings should be insulated, retrofitted and refurbished and properly maintained.

Southwark Council’s estates have for well over 20 years been deliberately run down and demonised with some being demolished and replaced. Around 1000 council homes on the Aylesbury Estate have already been demolished buy around 1,700 are still occupied but currently scheduled for demolition.

*Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate*.

These homes were well built for the time to higher standards than their replacement and could easily and relatively cheaply be brought up to modern levels of services and insulation with at least another 50 years of life. The estate was carefully designed with open spaces, natural daylight and a range of properties, many with some private outdoor space. The planned replacements are at higher density, less spacious and unlikely to last as long – and only include a small proportion at social rents. Current tenants are more secure and the properties are far more affordable.

*People on the street watch and video the march*

Many of those whose homes have already been demolished here and on the neighbouring Heygate estate have been forced to move outside the area, some far from London as they can no longer afford to live here.

*Bubbles and Marchers on Walworth Road on their way to the Aylesbury Estate.*

Although the developers have profited greatly from their work with Southwark Council here and in other estates, and some officers and councillors involved have personally landed well-paying corporate jobs and enjoyed lavish corporate hospitality, the schemes have largely been financial disasters for the council and council tax payers.

Fight4Aylesbury was formed in 199 as Aylesbury Tenants and Residents First, and has been fighting Southwark Council’s plans to demolish the estate since then. While these schemes – part of New Labour’s regeneration initiative – have always been destructive of local communities and disastrous for many of those whose homes have been demolished, we now see that they are also environmentally unsupportable.

You can watch a video on YouTube of Aysen Dennis, Fight4Aylesbury and Tanya Murat, Southwark Defend Council Housing talking about the protest, and FIght4Aylesbury recently released a newsletter, The Future of the Aylesbury with more details on the estate and their proposals. A few more of my pictures from the event are in the album Housing For Need Not Greed – National Action Day, London, UK and are available for editorial use on Alamy.

Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt 2008

Sunday 18th May 2008, 15 years ago today, was an unusual day for me in two ways. Firstly that I went to Birmingham rather than London, but mainly that I went not primarily as a photographer, but as one of thousands of protesters, though that did not stop me taking photographs as you can see.

Recent developments in Artificial Intelligence are arousing considerable debate among photographers, partly about redundancy with AI generated imagery already replacing photographers in some areas of marketing and advertising work, but more importantly about authenticity now that you can generate seemingly photographic images of anything whether it actually happened or not.

Of course it has always been possible to make photographs which are misleading and dishonest, either at the point of exposure or later in the darkroom or more recently and trivially easy on a computer. There have been many historical examples and more recent controversies about faking or altering photographs, especially in some photojournalistic environments.

Of course in some areas of photography clearly anything goes. We don’t expect a work of art to be a literal interpretation, but when we come to news or photojournalism we expect things to be true to the event or occasion. And the only guarantee of that is the integrity of the reporter.

Of course as I wrote at the start of my piece on ‘Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt’, “You can’t take photographs without a point of view. Literally and metaphorically so – the rationale for making the picture determines the technical aspects of actually making the exposure. Where you stand isn’t just a matter of where you put your feet.”

I hope that my photographs make my position clear, as do the texts that I write to go with them, though on My London Diary and here I express my opinions as well as stating what appear to me to be the facts which accompany my images sent to the agencies I’ve worked with. I also don’t have to stick within the character limits they impose, typically limiting me to around a 100 words or less. Enough for the who, what, where and when but seldom much about the why, seldom enabling any real analysis of the events.

As my vintage website shows I’d been in Birmingham in May 1998 with some 70,000 others, forming a human chain around the centre of Birmingham, UK where the leaders of the eight richest nations in the G8 were holding a conference.

We were then part of a campaign by Jubilee 2000 to persuade the G8 countries to ‘break the chain of debt‘. Third-world countries were given massive loans in the 1970’s and are now crippled by the repayments, which now mean that a massive amount of money comes from the poor to the rich in repayments.

The noise we made back then made the world leaders come out from their conference room and listen, but then they went back inside and continued with business as usual. As I wrote in 2008, “Our actions in May 1998 had set the ball rolling, but as yet it has only gone one fifth of the way, and 80% of debts remain. All governments, including our own, have been guilty of making many promises that they have not kept on debt relief and aid.“

Things overall have changed little since then, although some countries in the global south have become rather more desperate and more vocal particularly as the effects of climate change increasingly hit them.

I wrote at some length about the day and the protest on My London Diary in 2008 and I won’t repeat that here, but hope some at least will click the link to read it.

At the end of that piece I wrote about the problem for those who didn’t have a long ladder in photographing what was an attempt to form and photograph the world’s largest human pie chart. I can’t find the official photograph on the web and I think it may have been little if any better than mine.

2008 Journey to Justice – Drop the Debt
1998 Jubilee 2000 – Birmingham